Tom Kha Gai Recipe: What Is Tom Kha Gai? Thai Coconut Chicken Soup

Tom Kha Gai Recipe

This week I am making my version of a Tom Kha Gai recipe. Tom Kha Gai is Thai coconut chicken soup. The weather is getting cold and I thought I would just make some good old fashioned Jewish penicillin (New York style chicken soup) and then I thought to myself I could do that anytime and lots of people have done it already. This Tom Kha Gai recipe in my opinion is a great version of Thai penicillin. Tom Kha Gai is warming and creamy and is loaded with lovely herbs and spices to make some of the best chicken soup that one has ever had. It's really a pretty simple and yet very delicious chicken.  This Tom Kha Gai recipe has all the distinctive Thai flavors that one would expect in a Thai dish.  Tom Kha Gai (Gai is chicken) has an ingredient in it called galangal (In Thai Kha) There is one substituition I am using in my Tom Kha Gai recipe and that is using ginger in place of galangal as I could not locate any galangal this week and then I will be using the other ingredients of lemongrass and kaffir limes leaves to infuse the coconut milk and chicken broth/stock that I make as well. A good Tom Kha Gai recipe will have a good balance of salty, sweet, spicy, and sour flavors. Of course when it comes time to make flavor adjustments to your Tom Kha Gai recipe you can manipulate them in any way that you like to suit your needs. This chicken soup is a total winner to warm you up in the winter months. The combination of herbs and spices will also help to fortify you with nutrients to help ward off that cold or flu! I mean isn't that what chicken soup is for anyway? Of course it is! My version a Thai Tom Kha Gai recipe will have some garlic in it and of course the chilies will help fight off that winter cold and give you a vitamin C shot to boot! Tom Kha Gai is a soup that can be served as an appetizer or as a main course depending on how you make it.  If you add noodles or even rice to your Tom Kha Gai recipe then it then becomes a main meal and if you exclude those items Tom Kha Gai then becomes an excellent appetizer. Either way Tom Kha Gai is a delicious chicken soup recipe. I'm making my Tom Kha Gai recipe this week as a main meal with the addition of rice noodles.

Tom Kha Gai can be made many ways. When I learned to cook I learned to make chicken soup or stock/broth using whole chickens or whole chickens cut up with the skin on. Then some herbs and spices would be added to the mixture while it was simmering. Jewish penicillin can be made with the addition of chicken innards or even chicken feet! I LOVE chicken feet. I have never had Tom Kha Gai in Thai restaurants that served it with chicken feet although I think that would really give it that soul food aspect of cooking. I won't be using chicke feet in my Tom Kha Gai recipe this week but rest assured chicken feet are on my future menu! A lot of recipes out there call for using boxed organic chicken stock in their Tom Kha Gai recipe and that is fine if you want to speed up the cooking process. Today I will be simmer a cut up chicken for at least 2 to 3 hours which is chicken broth. I will then remove the meat from the carcass and add the bones back to the broth for an hour or so to fortify the flavor of the broth to be something closer to a chicken stock. There will also of course be some herbs and spices added to make the flavor of the broth/stock even better.

It seems popular today when you go to eat Tom Kha Gai in Thai restaurants that you will either have Nam Prig Pad or Pao added to the Tom Kha Gai or it will be available on the side. To my knowledge this is not traditional but, it is popular these days. I will not be offering it up in my recipe but you can use it in yours if you desire.  Some of my friends like to add either sesame oil or some form of chili oil to their Tom Kha Gai to. I will not be doing that either. I just LOVE to eat my Tom Kha Gai with rice noodles as a complete meal. In some restaurants the Tom Kha Gai is served in rather small bowls but believe you me I'll make mine a BIG bowl! This is how it's going to be made today. Enjoy the video!


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Knife Sharpening: How To Create A Cutting Edge From Scratch

Knife Sharpening

 

Hi everyone! I'm back this week and we are going to look at doing some knife sharpening. I have been on vacation visiting my brother in Los Angeles and it was good to go seem him and unwind.

This week I'm back and instead of cooking I thought I would do some knife sharpening for you. I have this friend name Chef Giovanni and he works at a place here in Vegas called Yellow tail. It's a sushi joint as the name entails and Chef Gio is one of my best friends here in town.

Ever since Gio got into the culinary industry he has been obsessed with knife sharpening and if you ask him today he will still tell everyone that everything he ever learned about knife sharpening he learned from me, yours truly! He and I have been friends a long time and it's a great compliment he pays me. He has learn his knife sharpening skills well and does some of the best work I have seen a professional chef do with their knives.

Knife sharpening is an art just as cooking is and therefore when the two are done to a high level of skill people know it. Recently Chef Gio went on a food trip to Korea. He spent a lot of time at the fish market watching how the Koreans prepare their seafood dishes and one thing Gio paid close attention to was knife skills and knife sharpening techniques.

Needless to say Chef Gio learned alot on his food trip. When he got back he brought me a knife much like the one's used at the local fish market. They come in various sizes and he brought me a rather large one for all around kitchen use. When it comes today's knife sharpening video this is the knife that I will be sharpening.

You see the knife he brought back from Korea has no cutting edge on it and I don't know if that is a matter of knives leaving the country or if the maker does it that way for the person doing the knife sharpening to put his or her own type of edge on the knife.

As far as the knife sharpening goes Gio told me that most of the people he saw using this knife had a 50/50 grind on the blade much like a European knife would have and I can see that the blade type is closer to a "V" or saber type grind.

This weeks knife sharpening video will show you how I will put a single edge bevel on this Korean knife. The knife is hand made and somewhat rudimentary but from the videos I saw they will just cut and cut and cut! The knife is made from hand hammered carbon steel so as far as the knife sharpening is concerned should not prove to be very difficult.

I will be using the standard gear that I always use for knife sharpening which is DMT diamond plates that I use in 220/325/600/1200 grits respectively. I will also be using Spyderco ceramic stones Models 204F and 204UF respectively. I will also most likely use my surgical black Arkansas stone as a final blade polishing stone. So sit back and check out how I do knife sharpening and enjoy the video!

Soup: Seafood Chowder: Bay Shrimp Chowder

The weather is finally getting really cold here where I live and that means it time to make some soup! This week I am making Bay Shrimp Chowder, a seafood chowder idea from a friend of mine named Tango Joe. I love soup in the winter! Who doesn't? Soup is warming, comforting and filling. The best part about soup is that they are easy to make and they really don't take much time to prepare. So this winter I will be making lots of soup recipe videos! So this week I am making  Tango Joe's Bay Shrimp Chowder. I've been experimenting with it lately and this is soon becoming a favorite soup of mine.

I got the recipe for this soup/seafood chowder from my friend and sub on Youtube named Tango Joe of the Tango Spice Company. The soup is called Bay Shrimp Chowder and it's a recipe that Joe has been working on for awhile. The reason I am making this soup is because I got interested in Joe's spices and I asked him to send me some to try out and in return I would make one of his recipes with it. He sent me the spice called Tango Verde Green and along with it he sent me a starter recipe for his soup recipe bay shrimp chowder. I make seafood chowder all the time but I usually make either A Manhattan style seafood chowder or a New England clam chowder. I have never made bay shrimp chowder or any kind of shrimp chowder at all. This was going to be good.

The soup recipe he sent me was his starter for Bay Shrimp Chowder. He told me to work on it because he didn't get the recipe where he wanted it to be.  So I am going to make Joe's soup with my little twists and make a final recipe for this seafood chowder/bay shrimp chowder! Now Joe and I love heat and for this reason this soup is going to be very warming indeed as I am going to be using Joe's Tango Verde Green in this seafood chowder.

Joe's Tango Verde Green is a dry spice that's a bitchin' combination of Jalapeno pepper, Habanero pepper, cuming, oregano, celery salt and black pepper. The balance of this spice will be delicious in this seafood chowder and I am sure in just about any soup recipe that requires some heat in it. This Tango Verde Green can be a bit tricky because it's not hot right off the bat, it's really a creeper and can catch you by surprise!

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